Anti-Trump activist Laura Moser defeated in Texas primary

Laura Moser, the Jewish author who launched an activist movement against the Trump presidency, was soundly defeated in her challenge to the Democratic establishment in a Texas primary.

Attorney Lizzie Fletcher bested Moser 68 to 32 percent in the race Tuesday in Texas’s 7th congressional district, comprising parts of Houston and its suburbs and considered a possible pickup for Democrats in November.

Soon after Donald Trump’s election as president, Moser founded Daily Action, a network of activists alerted each day to an advocacy action targeting Trump and his policies.

Her frustration with what she felt was a milquetoast Democratic Party response to Trump’s election led to her to launch a campaign for the nomination in Houston, her hometown. She head previously been Washington based.

Unusually for a primary, the Democratic establishment openly pushed back against her, fearing a nominee from the left would not wrest the seat from its Republican incumbent, John Culberson. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran an ad against her ahead of the first primary vote in March.

The tactic appeared to backfire at first, with leftist outrage at the Democrats propelling Moser to the second spot in a crowded race and denying Fletcher an outright victory. The contest went to a runoff.

Moser made her Jewish background a key element of her pitch, describing her grandfather’s path as a refugee from Nazi Germany to the safety of Texas. “Our Jewish children, with their father’s Indian last name and their mother’s bright-blue eyes, were now residents of the most diverse city in America,” she wrote a year ago in Vogue.

Democrats believe they have the momentum to win the U.S. House of Representatives in November, but the party is currently riven over how best to accomplish that, with the establishment favoring an approach that appeals to centrists and Republicans unhappy with Trump, and the left counseling a get out the vote approach targeting the grassroots.

The battle has been cast as pitting the legacy of Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee who lost to Trump, against that of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator who mounted a stronger than expected challenge against Clinton in the primaries. Sanders was the first Jewish candidate to win major party nominating contests. Our Revolution, a political action group set up to capitalize on his popularity endorsed Moser after the DCCC came out against her,

Anti-establishment Democrats won in primaries Tuesday for Georgia governor and for a congressional seat in Kentucky also seen as a possible Democratic pickup.